The Descent from the Cross (van der Weyden)

Christ's body is taken down from the cross (John 19:38-42), and as his mother faints with grief, van der Weyden curves her blue-robed body into an exact echo of her dead son's - the painting's unforgettable stroke. He crowds ten life-size figures into a shallow gilded box, like painted sculpture in a niche, so that nothing distracts from the choreography of sorrow: every tilted head, wrung hand, and falling tear. Where his countryman van Eyck pursued optical truth, Rogier van der Weyden made raw emotion his subject, and this panel made him the most imitated painter in northern Europe. A skull at the lower left marks Golgotha, the place of the skull.